TNC Building Beaver Dams

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View of a series of existing beaver dams downstream of beaver dam analogue restoration reach. Photo © The Nature Conservancy (Kristen Podolak)

Beavers can be highly destructive in the wrong environment, but are keystone species wherever they’ve been around for long enough to have designed their ecosystem. And in areas where for a number of reasons beaver populations have dwindled so much as to see deterioration in the habitat, The Nature Conservancy thinks that adding artificial dams can help restore the land by affecting sedimentation, creating floodplains, and storing water. Kristen Podolak, Rodd Kelsey, Sierra Harris, and Nathan Korb report:

The Nature Conservancy is working like a beaver (Castor canadensis) by mimicking beaver dam building to restore streams and floodplain habitat in Montana and California.

No kidding. Last year we built twelve instream structures that look and act like beaver dams on two streams in Montana and we plan to build six more in a small creek in Childs Meadow, California this fall.

Why try to act like beavers? Beavers are not a panacea and can be a nuisance when they block water diversions or chew down people’s favorite trees, which is why they have been persistently trapped and killed or relocated in many areas across North America.

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Photosynthesis as Biofeedback for Adjusting Light Levels in Greenhouses

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Photo of a small commercial indoor growing setup by CJP

We’ve recently shared interesting methods to improve the growth of plants, whether in the commercial or domestic setting. We learned that tomatoes may reduce need for pesticides, that plants can grow fairly well in artificial bubbles underwater, and now that technology might soon develop to use a metric of how much one’s plants are photosynthesizing to determine how much light they need, in an effort to cut electricity use. Catherine Elton reports for Conservation Magazine on a study published in the Journal of the American Society of Horticultural Science:

Indoor agriculture is gaining in popularity, and there are high expectations that—at a large enough scale—it could help satisfy the growing demand for food. But whether indoor farms, often called vertical farms or plant factories, make economic or environmental sense is hotly debated.

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Well Done, Portugal!

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Europe’s biggest wind energy park [in 2008] in the northern region of Viana do Castelo, Portugal. Photograph: Estela Silva/EPA

Always on the look for good news in the sphere of renewable energy, we found out this week that Portugal, a country with a population of over 10 million, operated for 107 hours solely on the alternative energy sources from wind-, solar-, and hydro-powered electricity. Arthur Nelsen reports for The Guardian:

Portugal kept its lights on with renewable energy alone for four consecutive days last week in a clean energy milestone revealed by data analysis of national energy network figures.

Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run that lasted from 6.45am on Saturday 7 May until 5.45pm the following Wednesday, the analysis says.

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Xandari, Another Saturday Morning

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IMG_4527

Today is my final day waking up at Xandari, at least for now. Rising with the sun each day, and heading for the trails, I often catch a view of something that I have not seen before. When it is something simple, elegant and expressive like this twirling twig I tend to keep my eyes open for more of a certain thing. Continue reading →

Xandari’s 2016 Big Day

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A male Red-legged Honeycreeper, the highlight of my 2016 big day

Last year, we shared some details about the Global Big Day, an event that I participated in very casually from Chicago back then, and contributed to more seriously this year, as did the rest of the global birding community, as the data from eBird published today shows. In 2015, 6,158 species were reported on 38,923 complete checklists from 14,787 participants across 140 countries. This year, 6,263 species were reported on 43,848 checklists from 15,953 participants across 145 countries. Every point of comparison displays an increase in participation and effort this time around!

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Weed-whacking Goats in New York City

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Photo © babygoatsandfriends.com

Goats are fun creatures, providers of milk, cheese, and meat, and also simply petting experiences. Apparently, they can even be rented out as lawn-mowing weed controllers, eating unruly plants where pesticides would otherwise be used. And certain parks in New York City are getting goats on contract to meet that need, as Olga Oksman reports for The Guardian:

Overexcited children and reporters mill around the fence enclosing part of the Prospect Park woodlands. “Daddy, daddy, look!” one eager little boy yells. Everyone is craning their necks, raising their cameras to get a shot. The latest celebrities to grace Brooklyn are a group of eight weed-eating goats, and they are taking up residency through the end of the summer.

Later this week, Prospect Park has arranged a wine and cheese reception so the public can formally meet the goats, which range from Nubian to Angora and Pygmy breeds. Tickets have already sold out.

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Solar Thermal vs Photovoltaics

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Photo © German Aerospace Center

Solar power is always on our radar, but we understand that storing the electricity from photovoltaics can be an issue. Today we are learning about a new solar technology for the first time, even though it revolves around something that we benefit from every day: the sun’s heat. Umair Irfan reports for Scientific American‘s ClimateWire section on this interesting idea being researched in Europe:

COLOGNE, Germany—At Germany’s aerospace agency, the next frontier is capturing the sun here on Earth and keeping it on tap.

In a 4-year-old glass and steel building near the Cologne-Bonn Airport, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany’s equivalent of NASA, are working on new ways to produce more heat than light in order to smooth over intermittency, one of the biggest drawbacks of solar power on the grid.

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A Just So Story by DNA

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A few years ago we shared a story similar to the one below, where Kipling’s Just So Stories were linked with reporting on modern evolutionary biology; a year before that, at the beginning of this blog’s start in India, we discussed Kipling’s ties to that country and its wildlife. From the New Yorker‘s Elements section comes the story “How the Giraffe Got Its Neck,” by Anthony Lydgate:

It’s difficult to know what to make of the giraffe. It shuffles like a camel (right legs forward, then left legs) but runs like a rabbit (hind legs forward, then front legs). Its distinctive aroma repulses many ticks but enchants certain people. It bellows, hisses, and moans in the wild, and in captivity it hums in the dark. It naps with its head aloft but sleeps like a swan, with its head on its haunches. Had Aristotle ever seen a giraffe, he might have said that it was the product of an interspecies dalliance at the watering hole, which he thought of as a kind of zoological swingers’ club—a place where “bastard animals are born to heterogeneous pairs.”

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The American Burying Beetle

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American burying beetles. Photo © St. Louis Zoo via Cool Green Science

Beetles, apart from being the most numerous type of insect in the world, comprise the largest group of animals in general, with somewhere between three- and four-hundred thousand species described; and that doesn’t even count the presumably undiscovered ones hiding out in some unexplored corner somewhere. We’ve covered dung beetles before, but also mycokleptic species, and now we’re learning about a very important carrion beetle in North America known as the American burying beetle from Ted Williams at The Nature Conservancy’s Cool Green Science blog:

The shiny black, orange-spotted adults can approach two inches in length. Offspring beg both parents for food, inducing regurgitation by stroking their jaws like wolf pups. They’re federally endangered American burying beetles, largest of the 31 species of North American carrion beetles.

Riding on the adults like oxpeckers are orange mites that keep them and their larval food supply free of fly eggs and microbes.

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Waste Not, Want Not

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Indian weddings (and other big parties) serve a lot of food — and have a lot of leftovers. Now there's a plan in Mumbai to share the surplus with those who are hungry. Mahesh Kumar A./AP

Indian weddings (and other big parties) serve a lot of food — and have a lot of leftovers. Now there’s a plan in Mumbai to share the surplus with those who are hungry.
Mahesh Kumar A./AP

Living in India provides daily examples of life’s major contradictions: silence and chaos, simplicity and grandeur, lack and excess… Traditional Indian weddings illustrate the examples of abundance – even the most modest of weddings will represent some version of the the proverbial “groaning board” – be it traditional banana-leaf thali of south India or an elaborate multi-course dinner in towering tents. Whenever food is prepared for a crowd there’s potential for waste, even in the so-called “developed world”.

The beauty of this inspiring story is how it taps into Mumbai’s dabbawalla system, taking advantage of the extraordinary logistics of a food distribution system that has functioned well for decades. (If you’ve never seen Ritesh Batra’s beautiful film The Lunchbox, run and find it now…)

India has 194.6 million undernourished people — that’s more than half the world total.It’s what people mean when they talk about “food insecurity:” the economic and social condition of limited or unpredictable access to adequate food.

But in a study published in the August 2015 issue of the journal Lancet, researchers found that India also has 46 million obese citizens.

The dabbawallas — Mumbai’s lunch delivery collective — have stepped in with an initiative they’re calling the Roti Bank. Their aim is to connect the have-nots with the have-too-muchs.

“We deal with food every day, so we’re ideally placed to fix this,” says Dashrath Kedare, a co-founder of the Roti Bank and a leader of one of the dabbawalla unions. Continue reading →

Southward, Ho!

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I had never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real. ILLUSTRATION BY BLEXBOLEX

We are happy any time this novelist takes time from his main craft to devote time to what seems to be his main personal passion, which might be identified as birding, or else more broadly speaking the environment in which birds thrive (or not). From this week’s New Yorker, another journey far away, southward, by Jonathan Franzen with an eye to environmentalist perspective:

The End of the End of the World

An uncle’s legacy and a journey to Antarctica.

BY

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn’t been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt’s memory.

It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She’d been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She’d said to me, impulsively, “I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you’ve always wanted to go.” To this I’d replied, for reasons I’m at a loss to reconstruct, “Antarctica?” Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Continue reading →

“Certified Transitional” Ingredients

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An interior view of Clif Bar headquarters in Emeryville, California. Photo © GreenBiz Group

We put a lot of stock in organic farming, as well as eating and drinking. If companies do it right, sourcing organically can make a difference. So it’s uplifting to read that two companies we support by buying their delicious products, Clif Bar and Kashi, are making an effort to bolster the organic ingredient supply chain by leading a new category for crops produced by farmers who are in the three-year process of switching from conventional agriculture to an organic label; it’s called “Certified Transitional.” Lauren Hepler reports for GreenBiz:

Inside an airy, post-industrial space situated on the East side of the San Francisco Bay, several brightly colored mountain bikes and the sail of a kite surfing set hang from a lofted ceiling above some 350 employees sprawled across the 150,000-square-foot headquarters of Clif Bar.

Outside, a small organic gardening plot has been set up next to the free daycare center for the children of employees at the famously outdoorsy food company.

“We start ’em young,” jokes Dean Mayer, Clif Bar’s communications manager.

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Hydropeaking Dams = Fewer Insects

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Hoover Dam, photo © US Bureau of Reclamation

Although we’ve heard of dams causing environmental and community problems before, we’ve also seen how they can be beneficial to society, and it’s clear that they’re a double-edged sword. Most recently on the topic, we learned that with proper planning and design, hydropower can be less of an enemy to conservation. Now, research highlighted in Conservation Magazine displays the possibility of helping native river-reliant insect populations by adjusting how dams “hydropeak,” or change river flow to compensate for electricity demand. Sarah DeWeerdt reports:

Scientists know that hydropower dams often decrease the abundance and diversity of aquatic insects downstream. But until now it wasn’t clear why—after all, dams cause a range of environmental stressors such as alterations in water flow, temperature, and sedimentation.

A massive new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey lays much of the blame on hydropeaking, the practice of varying river flows below a dam depending on electricity demand. Because of hydropeaking, the amount of water released from a dam can vary by as much as ten-fold throughout the day, creating an artificial intertidal zone that propagates for hundreds of kilometers downstream.

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Xandari, Monday Morning

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WestPoolSunrise

We are currently in the middle of filming a series of short films at Xandari, here in Costa Rica, to match the series of short films we have made of the various Xandari properties in Kerala, India. The film crew arrives at 4:45 so we can catch the rising sun, which I find best viewed from the west edge of the property. Above you can see some of the coffee planted in the last two years, in the midst of one of Xandari’s highly productive organic vegetable gardens. The film crew is drawn to this space at sunrise and sunset. Soon you will see why, cinematically. For now, some more images from the edge of the forest reserve, following Saturday morning’s outing; this time focused on various introduced species of flora that complement Costa Rica’s most famous introduced species of plant (high grade arabica coffee). Continue reading →